Two warring souls: Black nationalism, patriotism and the roots of independent black politics in Atlanta, Georgia, 1891--1924.

摘要

African Americans in Atlanta, Georgia adopted three distinct strategies as they confronted Jim Crow. The first of these was to embrace a utopian black nationalism that rejected the United States as irredeemably racist and advocated emigration to Africa, where black men and women could lead respectable lives. The second was to embrace the Republican Party as the only effective vehicle for black civil rights in the United States. In equating loyalty to the race with loyalty to the party, black Republicanism had at its heart a submerged black nationalism that cemented black allegiance to the GOP long after the party had proven indifferent to its black constituents. A third strategy accepted the exclusions of Jim Crow, but argued for basing the qualifications for first-class citizenship on the correct performance of bourgeois respectability rather than having the right skin color. Thus, this "politics of respectability" sought to replace the stratification of citizenship by race with exclusions based on gender and class.;Each of these strategies defined different - and sometimes conflicting - terms of racial solidarity, which were based on particular constellations of class and gender that inhibited the emergence of an independent black politics. As African Americans responded to the Atlanta race riot and the Brownsville Affray of 1906, the success of Georgia's disfranchisement movement in 1908, and the impact of urban development on the black household, the discourses of class and gender that undergirded both black loyalty to the GOP and the politics of respectability underwent significant transformations. This resulted in the renegotiation of the relationship between black elites and the black working-class and partially resolved the tensions between black patriotism and black nationalism that lay at the heart of black loyalty to the GOP.;Although these crises left black Atlanta demoralized, they transformed black understandings of gender and class. This enabled the black patriotic unity that emerged during World War I to stimulate the development of a "political black nationalism." This, in turn, laid the groundwork for an independent, if short-lived, black electoral balance of power in post-war Atlanta organized by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.